Cardiac mapping is used to locate aberrant electrical pathways and currents emanating within the heart. Such aberrant pathways cause irregular contractions of the heart muscle resulting in life-threatening patterns or disrhythmias.
Intercardiac mapping requires careful positioning of the electrodes within the heart. Various steering mechanisms for catheters carrying such electrodes have heretofore been developed and used.
To provide catheters having different curve configurations to access various endocardial sites, physicians have to stock and use number of different catheters, each of which provides a different curve configuration. Commercially available catheters, thus, come in sets, which often provide 4 to 7 different curve configurations by using different catheters.
This approach presents serious disadvantages, because the physician often must repeatedly remove and re-insert these different catheters to complete a procedure on a given patient.
A need exists for a catheter which could be steered into different curvatures without removing and re-inserting a different catheter.